Google Plus Shutting Down Early After Another Data Breach

It seems like the Google social media platform, Google Plus has been becoming a stumbling block in the fortune of the Google Company with each passing day. Right after the day when Google announce about the Google Plus Data Breach a few months ago, the company publicized about the Google+ shutting down. Notably, a major security bug in Google Plus affected as many as 50+ million Google accounts that resulted in user data leak of all the affected Google + accounts to third-party developers. Consequently, Google’s official representative has announced that the company is going to be shut down the Google Plus services for its users in August 2019. However, things got even worse when the company has found out that another privacy breach is making Google Plus user data and personal information accessible to developers. As per Google’s official spokesperson, a November software updated caused Google + API to make the users’ personal data visible to developers.

It seems like the Google social media platform, Google Plus has been becoming a stumbling block in the fortune of the Google Company with each passing day. Right after the day when Google announce about the Google Plus Data Breach a few months ago, the company publicized about the Google+ shutting down. Notably, a major security bug in Google Plus affected as many as 50+ million Google accounts that resulted in user data leak of all the affected Google + accounts to third-party developers. Consequently, Google’s official representative has announced that the company is going to be shut down the Google Plus services for its users in August 2019. However, things got even worse when the company has found out that another privacy breach is making Google Plus user data and personal information accessible to developers. As per Google’s official spokesperson, a November software updated caused Google + API to make the users’ personal data visible to developers.

The company, however, ensured that the bug has not affected the users’ passwords and financial data. According to a statement released by the Google, “No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the developers who inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.”

Google is currently working on informing all the affected users who might have suffered the data breach. Furthermore, the company has announced the news of Google Plus shutting down early amid another privacy hole it investigated. Earlier, Google announced to shut down Google+ in August 2019 whereas this new data breach has prompted the company to shut down Google plus by April 2019. Google has also declared that it will shut down all Google + API within the next 90 days.

The latest Google Plus bug is said to be active for only 6 days in early November. The new security flaw affected the Google + People API that is accountable to give permission to third-party apps to view profile information including users’ names, gender, email address, birthday, age, occupation, and relationship status as well. The bug allowed apps developers to access even the information that users have set to private only.

Google states that there is no evidence of this data being misused in any way. The company further says that there may be the chances that even developers were not aware that they had access to all this information since the bug was alive only for six days from November 7 to 13, 2018. Contrary to the last instant when Google was vastly condemned for taking too long to fix the bug, the company, this time, ensuring that it investigated and fixed this bug within a week.

“We understand that our ability to build reliable products that protect your data drives user trust,” as per Google official blog post. “We have always taken this seriously, and we continue to invest in our privacy programs to refine internal privacy review processes, create powerful data controls, and engage with users, researchers, and policymakers to get their feedback and improve our programs.” says another blog post.